Academy Awards, rich San Francisco style
The most noticeable part was the men dressed as Oscars, paid to stand completely still for four hours. Skintight gold costumes left nothing to the imagination, not even the package. I saw all configurations, hanging down and to the left, up and to the right, and so on. Curiously, no one chose the straight-up or straight-down positions.
I had ended up at San Francisco's most opulent Oscar party. Three hundred dollars and a black-tie outfit was all you needed to spend the night with similarly extravagantly wealthy people staring at large televisions. A friend's restaurant had donated food and I helped serve it. In jeans and a t-shirt, I fit in about as well as E.T. The proceeds of the event went to AIDS research; almost all of the two thousand people in attendance were gay. Subsequently, among women in glamorous ball-gowns and men in tuxedos, sauntered men in glamorous ballgowns and women in tuxedos.
Decorations, gourmet food, wine and VIP rooms (VIP? More expensive than 300 dollars?) filled the warehouse-sized venue. "All this in a recession," my friend bemoaned, "It's so over the top". It was hard to disagree and I couldn't shake a vague feeling of wrongness. The scene was likely a replay of a hundred such events in 1929 right before everything came crashing down. The forced merriness, the ostentatiousness, the wealth every detail spoke of -- from the belly-dancers to the selection of elite vodkas.
But should life really grind to a halt just because the economy has? There were plenty of rich people left over after the depression and, hell, we want them to spend money according to economic theory. If that money is twenty thousand dollars bid in the silent auction on a Picasso or a Chagall, it's still grease on the wheels of the economy. So why did I spend the whole night fighting a sense of impending doom?
I had ended up at San Francisco's most opulent Oscar party. Three hundred dollars and a black-tie outfit was all you needed to spend the night with similarly extravagantly wealthy people staring at large televisions. A friend's restaurant had donated food and I helped serve it. In jeans and a t-shirt, I fit in about as well as E.T. The proceeds of the event went to AIDS research; almost all of the two thousand people in attendance were gay. Subsequently, among women in glamorous ball-gowns and men in tuxedos, sauntered men in glamorous ballgowns and women in tuxedos.
Decorations, gourmet food, wine and VIP rooms (VIP? More expensive than 300 dollars?) filled the warehouse-sized venue. "All this in a recession," my friend bemoaned, "It's so over the top". It was hard to disagree and I couldn't shake a vague feeling of wrongness. The scene was likely a replay of a hundred such events in 1929 right before everything came crashing down. The forced merriness, the ostentatiousness, the wealth every detail spoke of -- from the belly-dancers to the selection of elite vodkas.
But should life really grind to a halt just because the economy has? There were plenty of rich people left over after the depression and, hell, we want them to spend money according to economic theory. If that money is twenty thousand dollars bid in the silent auction on a Picasso or a Chagall, it's still grease on the wheels of the economy. So why did I spend the whole night fighting a sense of impending doom?